The Merry Misogynist

him.”
    “You think he done it, don’t you?”
    “It’s too early to say, Comrade. But as far as we know he was the last person to see your daughter alive. When I left your farm I stopped by the regional registry office. There was no record of a marriage on March the seventh.”
    “No, he…Phan said it was better to register here in Vientiane. He brought all the papers signed and stamped when he turned up for the ceremony. He said Ngam would have more rights here, easier to get a passport, he said. But the ceremony was all proper, brother. We had the local official tie the wrists, and they made their vows. We even had a monk there. In the eyes of heaven it was decent.”
    Phosy arrived back from Luang Nam Tha just as the rice truck was pulling out of the hospital grounds. He went straight to the morgue and directly into Siri’s office. He was obviously worked up about something.
    “Siri, I did it. I met the – ”
    “Good health, Inspector Phosy.”
    “What? Yeah, anyway, I – ”
    “I’d imagine, as you’ve been away for a few days, you’d probably want to go directly into the cutting room and say hello to your very pregnant wife.”
    Phosy smiled and put his pack on the chair.
    “Exactly what I was planning to do,” he said.
    It was a brief reunion because three minutes later he was back.
    “Now,” said Siri.
    “Did I just see a body in the truck going out?”
    “You did.”
    “Was it…?”
    “It was.”
    Siri spent the next fifteen minutes going over the details of his trip north. Phosy was scribbling as fast as he could in his already full notepad, stopping Siri now and then to clarify and expand.
    “I need to get back to headquarters as soon as I can to find out what’s happening,” Phosy decided. “You know? Most of this country’s in an information black hole. People up in Luang Nam Tha get more news from Beijing than they do from Vientiane. Only the military seem to have any operable communication equipment and that’s for authorized personnel only. When I was military intelligence I outranked all those stuffed shirts up there. But out of uniform they treated me like I was a pig farmer. I have a good mind – what are you laughing at?”
    Siri swung back onto his favourite two legs of the chair and put his hands behind his head.
    “Phosy, I never begrudge a man a good grumble, but I was rather hoping to hear what transpired in the deep north.”
    “You’re right.” Phosy flipped back through his notes but started to speak without referring to them. “I didn’t have any trouble finding the lycee student’s sister. But I did have a problem getting her to speak. She denied she’d ever heard the story. It wasn’t till I told her I’d travelled half the country just to talk to her and I’d arrest her little sister for lying that her memory started to come back. It turns out she’d picked up the story from her boyfriend. He’d heard it from a fellow who used to be in the army. He was the horse’s mouth.”
    “He’d seen it for himself?”
    “And tried to forget. It was early in ‘69. Chaos everywhere. Most of the fighting was concentrated around Huaphan and the east. But it spilled over into the northernmost provinces from time to time. The Royalists were recruiting younger and younger conscripts to defend key installations. Nobody up there really wanted to fight against their own people, but the RLA was one of the few employers that offered a living wage. The young fellow who told the story was called Sida. He’d only been stationed in Luang Nam Tha town for two months. The local police had already fled the scene for fear they’d be shot in their beds by PL sympathizers. The regional army commander had to do something to convince the locals somebody was keeping the peace. He didn’t want all-out anarchy. So, as a token gesture, he sent half a dozen of his young boys to man the police box in town. They weren’t qualified to do anything but walk around the streets and look official. Heaven forbid they’d have a crime to investigate.
    “Sida’s on duty one afternoon when a hunter comes down from the hills and reports he’s seen a body. The boy’s very first case, not even a drunk and disorderly or littering offence before that. So Sida and his pal follow the hunter up the hill road. They don’t expect much of a shock. There’s a civil war on. People are getting killed all the time. All they have to do is identify which uniform the victim is wearing